Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, the Prime Minister is a broken record of broken promises, and the list keeps on growing. There are broken promises on spending, and we still do not have a budget plan. There are broken promises on consultants and on consulting with Canadians. There are broken promises to have his elbows up with the Americans. Instead, what the Prime Minister has lifted is his middle finger to Canadian…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, pursuant to subsection 49.8(5) of the Parliament of Canada Act, I rise to discharge my obligations as the chair of the Conservative caucus and to inform you of the recorded votes of the first Conservative caucus meeting, which took place on May 6, 2025. Division C.1 of the act requires that four votes be taken at the first meeting of every recognized caucus following a general electio…
Read full speech →Statements by Members
Mr. Speaker, T'is the week before Christmas, and all through this House MPs dream of returning to home, hearth and spouse Our stockings are hung by our chimneys with care But what of the homeless? Who put them out there? There's fingers to point and random people to blame But, mostly, I think of one person I'd name And that's Rideau Cottage's middle-aged Swifty Who, through taxes, inflation and bu…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, on a point of order. If you seek it, you will find unanimous consent to let this member go on and on forever. With such wisdom dispensed from his lips with every word he says, surely we can cancel our Christmas holidays to enjoy the pearls of wisdom that he continues to drop upon us—
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for his question. He has demonstrated that it is possible to be brief in one's comments, a lesson that the member for Winnipeg North would do well to remember for the future. Since this is the first I have heard of this, I think it will be necessary—
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, the hon. parliamentary secretary offered his opinion as to what the only problem in the House is. I want to ask my hon. colleague whether he would agree with me that the problem in the House is that the Prime Minister has emasculated the entire caucus and does not allow anybody to speak except for the one member and the member for Kingston and the Islands, who take up all the time des…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, do civil liberties count as a metric? Does freedom count as a metric? Does someone's ability to be with their loved ones when they are dying count as a metric? If they do, then we were terrible. Not all of that was the fault of the federal government. It was the fault of—
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to see you today taking the chair as we begin our proceedings. I think back to the fond memories I have over the past few years. I think, like all of us, I kind of divide my life into the pre-COVID and post-COVID world. The very first time I was able to be away from home as restrictions were gradually being lifted during the immediate aftermath of the COVID lockdowns …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, the hon. member for Winnipeg North is, of course, interrupting, as he always does. I do not know if a speech ever gets made in the House that does not involve an interruption from him, whose word count is already far greater than that of the rest of us. He really ought to wait his turn. Let us see if he can do that for the rest of this day as a special test, as a Christmas gift to all…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, was that actually a point of order? That was not a point of order. I think that just made my point, did it not? I am thankful the member for Winnipeg North just made my point for me. No, I did not hear about this until now. I have a policy when I am dealing with the media that I never comment on an issue to the first person who tells me about it. I want to go back to find out more. On…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, of course, Doug Ford enthusiastically supported the Prime Minister's restrictions on civil rights, and that was one of the many points on which I have departed from Doug Ford. However, I will point out that I do not love Doug Ford. Nobody who knows me thinks I love Doug Ford. If members were to go online to google “Doug Ford, Scott Reid, Stalin”, they would find a reference to me comp…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, the member's intervention gives me the opportunity to make another point. I did talk about the election in 2000 when only two members of my party were elected in Ontario. That was an election where 98 out of 102 ridings in Ontario had members who were elected for the Liberal Party. The other riding was the one that the member currently holds, and it was Joe Comartin, who was a great m…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, first of all, I want to thank the hon. member for his kind words. Likewise, one of the highlights of my career was working on the parliamentary Special Committee on Electoral Reform, which this member chaired. He did an extraordinary job with what, I have to say, was a very difficult file. We do not often get the chance to say nice things about each other. I actually do think highly o…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the Expression of Interest published by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) for the commercial leasing of a building at Joyceville Institution: (a) what is the specific nature of the unidentified “steel clad structure” to be leased under this Expression of Interest; (b) what type of commercial activities does the steel clad structure have the potential to accommodate; (c) how m…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, I have been a member of Parliament for 24 years. This is the first time I have flipped the bird to anybody. To correct the member, it was not to the government; it was to the member for Kingston and the Islands, but of course, nobody deserves that, and I withdraw it and apologize to the House.
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the CRA: (a) how many toll-free telephone lines are available for taxpayers to contact the agency, broken down by purpose or business line; (b) what are the toll-free telephone numbers in (a); (c) for callers who call each of the numbers in (b), what has been the average wait time to speak with an agent, for each of the last five years; (d) what percentage of callers to the numbers …
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the National Housing Strategy: (a) what funding programs or streams are dedicated to, or include streams or criteria for, rural or remote communities, and how much funding has been allocated for and disbursed by each one, broken down by year; (b) what is the population cap, or analogous constraint, on applications to funding programs or streams dedicated to, or which consider the re…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
With regard to the cow barn under construction by the Correctional Service of Canada (CSC) at Joyceville Institution and the dairy research program: (a) what was the original anticipated cost of building a cow barn at the time of the June 2018 announcement, and what was the anticipated cost of building the barn at the time the construction contract was awarded in March 2022; (b) what was the origi…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I am fascinated by that recent comment, that there might be something in the Leader of the Opposition's past that, if he gets a security clearance, gets to see it and is required to not speak about it, will somehow become public. I do not see how that works. This is a terrible secret that is known to the Prime Minister, something that is a scandal, something that is terrible. The Pr…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, my petition is also on the subject of Falun Gong or Falun Dafa, a peaceful practice that emphasizes truth, compassion and forbearance and that is centred on Chinese traditional practices. Its practitioners have been persecuted for, frankly, no good reason by the Chinese government since 1999. The petitioners request that Canada take a strong stance against the persecution, and in part…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I am returning to the subject of a question that I first raised in this place on June 14. That was a while ago, so I am going to read what I wrote at the time. I said: Madam Speaker, I will ask the housing minister something this time. Carleton Place, in my riding, has been Canada's fastest-growing municipality for the past four years. When the town was given zero dollars from the h…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, that is one heck of a misrepresentation of what I got up and said six months ago. I said that 97% of the money was going elsewhere in Ontario, a fact which is not disproved by telling me that there is funding that has gone to Kelowna, British Columbia, or to Calgary, Alberta. I just want to observe that if the minister's letters to me soliciting my feedback are to be taken seriously…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Madam Speaker, on a point of order, the hon. member referred to an hon. colleague by their personal name as opposed to the name of their riding, which we do not do here.
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, in his earlier comments, the member for Timmins—James Bay used the term “total falsehood”, which I think may be unparliamentary. I am not certain of that, but if it is, it would be a good idea for him to withdraw it.
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, on November 8, I raised a question regarding newly unredacted briefing notes. To be fair, they are still only partially unredacted. There is plenty still hidden, but they are less redacted than previously. They are notes provided by Correctional Service Canada officials to the minister from 2015 to 2019. They were originally sought in 2019. The government managed to delay their rele…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, the hon. member talked about the success of CORCAN programs. Well, then, if she thinks they are so great, she should listen to what CORCAN said in the briefing note that the government kept hidden for five years: Based on the empirical evidence accumulated by CSC, Public Safety, and international research, prison industrial farming, even if accommodated to include elements of “pet t…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, last weekend, it was reported that David Lavery from Perth, Ontario, had been detained by the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr. Lavery is the hero known as “Canadian Dave” who rescued hundreds during the fall of Kabul. After all other Canadian officials had already been evacuated, Canadian Dave and his team stayed on in Kabul to ensure the safe passage of Canadians and others on the final f…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Madam Speaker, the Information Commissioner has forced the public safety minister to release previously redacted briefing notes from 2018 that reveal Corrections Canada recommended against opening the Kingston prison farms because they would not enhance the likelihood of post-incarceration employment, not reduce recidivism, cost millions of dollars to operate and make public safety results worse. …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I rise on a point of order. I have no idea, but it strikes me that the member's statement that the Leader of the Opposition is in borderline contempt is an attempt to say something through the back door that cannot be said through the front door. I hope the member would withdraw that. While he is at it, his factually incorrect statement about Stephen Harper being held in contempt sh…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, on a point of order, I believe the allegation by the member, what he characterizes as borderline contempt of Parliament, is itself unparliamentary. I would ask him to withdraw it. It is the second time he has done this. Doing it twice when it is wrong does not make it right.
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Madam Speaker, it is coming from the documents that were withheld from all of us for six years. On October 15, Corrections Canada closed the bidding in what it characterized as an “invitation to submit an expression of interest...to operate a commercial activity from a building(s) located at Joyceville Institution...and provide offender employment and vocational training.” I think this refers to t…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, thank you for getting my riding name right time after time. It is an impressive feat and I appreciate it. There was a sort of drive-by smear comment from the member for Kingston and the Islands a bit earlier, in his questions and comments. He essentially asserted that the government is passing the legislation in order to protect people like my hon. colleague here. I just happen to not…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, my colleague is quite right. We could, and probably should, go to an election. The House of Commons has a kind of tenuous confidence in the government right now, so it would seem. It should be understood that “confidence”, used in the parliamentary sense, does not mean robust confidence; it means unwillingness to trigger an election. Certainly, in this party, we are willing to go to a…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I think I have the numbers right, 93 Conservative members of Parliament. I am not sure how this is costing money. We are not paid by the word here. We are not the authors of potboilers. I can only observe that if this is how things work, if it is the case that time that is wasted in the House of Commons is the public's money being squandered, then surely the member opposite, who has t…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, there are really two ways of slicing this. The implication is that these conflicts were reported to the ministers, and the ministers saw them and decided not to act, which is itself obviously outrageous. The other possibility, which is entirely possible, remembering always the dictum that one ought never to ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence, and looking at …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, this debate has been going on for some time. We have gone through the original motion and an amendment and now we are dealing with a subamendment to the motion. It all refers back to a previous motion, which was adopted on June 10 in the House of Commons, so I thought it might be helpful to go back and review the wording of those motions to make sure that we all know what is being dis…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Mr. Speaker, I likewise very much enjoy my colleague's interventions. I enjoy them much more than the ones from the member for Winnipeg North, if we are being honest about things, although I do not get to enjoy them as frequently. I want to say with regard to this that I was intimately involved in the procedure and House affairs hearings in 2011 into the purported contempt of Parliament of the the…
Read full speech →Routine Proceedings
Mr. Speaker, I, too, am rising to present a petition regarding Falun Gong and the organ harvesting issue. I was the chair of the parliamentary committee that heard compelling testimony about this heinous practice. The petitioners call for Canada to adopt legislation to stop forced organ harvesting and publicly call for an end to the persecution of Falun Gong, a peaceful movement that embodies the …
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I hope the parliamentary secretary will understand my point when I note that one of the numbers he cited makes the whole point here: 68 inmates have completed Red Seal certificates since 2021. That is in three years. That is 22 or 23 per year, which is not much in a country with thousands of inmates. It points to the problem that the reports I was citing get at. Our programs are vas…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, I am rising today to follow up on a question from June 17. Admittedly, it was a very long time ago, but the nature of the world of adjournment proceeding questions is that sometimes they follow considerably after the original question was asked. An unhappy coincidence is that none of the issues that were raised on June 17 have been resolved. This relates to training in federal penal…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, my intervention is about corrections but I have to correct something that the hon. member just said a second ago, that our emissions were down 8%. Our emissions were up several thousand per cent last year, 2023, because our forests were on fire. We became the world's third largest emitter. The lousy forestry practices of the government are a substantial contributor to that ecologica…
Read full speech →Concurrence in Committee Reports
Madam Speaker, my question to the member is about the pattern this report finds, which is so similar to a pattern we see repeated over and over again under the government. We could look at the promise to plant two billion trees, with results that are wildly at variance and much lower, as a representative example. We expect governments to be imprecise, I suppose, and inefficient compared to the pri…
Read full speech →Adjournment Proceedings
Madam Speaker, is the parliamentary secretary denying that members of the panel sold cattle to the prison farm program, which is an obvious conflict of interest?
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, first of all, happy birthday to Henry. Since we are on that trend, on October 10, it will be my brother's birthday, so happy anticipated birthday to Blake. As usual, he will be getting a book on flying for his birthday gift. My brother is a pilot; in fact, he flew over Parliament Hill as the lead aircraft in the July 1 Canada Day celebrations in a 1928 De Havilland DH.60. I have no …
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, there are several different things to unpack in that question. I know the next speaker is going to be this very same member; she knows a great deal about this topic. I hope that, if she does not mind veering away from the prepared text she had, she will share her thoughts on the subject. With regard to the issue of methane gas, in general, I heartily agree with her that trapped meth…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, that is a good question. Those foundations are a sort of quasi-government creature. They also exist in the United Kingdom in the form of quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations. The United Kingdom was experiencing the same problems we have here. I think that the changes that were made in the U.K. to improve the issues with quasi-autonomous non-governmental organizations coul…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, just to refresh the House, this debate has been going on for a couple of days now, and it might be helpful to return to Mr. Berthold's amendment, which we are debating today. The motion is: That the government's failure of fully providing documents, as ordered by the House on June 10, 2024, be hereby referred to the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs. The amendment re…
Read full speech →Orders of the Day
Madam Speaker, I think that two issues are being conflated here. The separation of the executive, judiciary and legislative functions is less formalized here than it is under the United States Constitution. People often regard these as being much more systematic silos here than they actually are. What I think is really going on here, to the extent that it is legitimate, is an issue of what we woul…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, that is why I filled out a late show form in advance. To provide advice on how best to reopen the prison farm at Joyceville, near Kingston, the Correctional Service of Canada appointed a prison farm advisory panel. The panel's advice was to add a cow dairy program. One result of this advice has been the purchase of cattle from members of the very same advisory panel. Another result ha…
Read full speech →Oral Questions
Mr. Speaker, when Canadians have problems with their CRA My Account online, they have no choice but to contact the ministry by telephone. Here is what typically happens: When they call the CRA's toll-free number, more often than not, they are greeted by a recorded message telling them the line is full and to try again later. When they do get through, they are frequently put on hold for as long as …
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